Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Cancel Culture Real?" with Katie Herzog

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"Is Cancel Culture Real?" with Katie Herzog · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  We are an amazing species, an amazing culture, an amazing civilization, whenever you feel
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  down, just spare a tiny thought for the fact that at any other time, and in almost any
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  other place, people lived lives of more hardship, more danger, more hunger than you.
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  That doesn't mean you're not allowed to feel blue, you are.
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  It just means that there are a lot of things that you don't have to feel blue about, that
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  most humans who ever lived did.
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  And what has generated this bounty that we currently enjoy?
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  We didn't steal it, despite the ills of colonialism, we didn't.
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  From whom did we steal space rockets and marriage equality and in vitro fertilization?
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  We didn't get it because we were uniquely violent.
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  Many more violent cultures, litter history.
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  To the extent that we are free and plump and equal, it's because of one thing above all
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  others.
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  It's because we started listening to each other, arguing with each other, enlightening each
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  other, what made the Enlightenment different, what unleashed the ferocious creativity of
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  the modern age, was that we stopped respecting witch hunts and dogmas, dark age thinking,
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  judgmentalism and sensoriousness.
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  We started having conversations that were mind expanding, that were generous and above
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  all conversations that were uncomfortable.
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  Well, I'm wildly excited for today's show, a fantastic episode.
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  Do you remember the letter, the letter, the Harpers letter, which caused such a cuffuffle?
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  It was a letter published in Harpers magazine, which was essentially a call by a number
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  of intellectuals, everyone from Nome Chomsky on the left to people whose names currently
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  escape me on the right.
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  But anyway, a huge gaggle of influential and esteemed people saying, can we all take
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  a deep breath and be a bit more respectful to one another in the public sphere?
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  Because all of us value free speech and the free exchange of ideas more than holding
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  our punches and trying to conform to what everyone thinks is the nice thing to say.
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  This letter, would in any other year, have been regarded as a fairly uncontroversial statement
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  of traditional, small or liberal classical liberal values that have undergirded western
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  civilization since the Enlightenment.
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  But unfortunately, in the current climate, it was seen as an insult to provocation, an
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  alt-right adjacent attempt to undermine the legitimate grievances of minorities.
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  So I wanted to talk to one of its signatories, perhaps my favorite of its signatories,
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  Katie Herzog, who she actually had an article written about her in The New York Times
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  about a year before the letter, which was entitled, those people we tried to cancel, they're
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  all hanging out together, because she's a journalist, she was living and working in Seattle,
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  and in 2017, she wrote an article in which she reported on people who had reversed or
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  halted their gender transition, and she subsequently received a tremendous amount of hate
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  mail and ostracization, and she ended up moving from Seattle to the suburbs.
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  So she was profiled along with other people in The New York Times as part of this kind
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  of what they call an intellectual gray area, or the problematic adjacent people.
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  She now has a podcast, a wildly successful podcast called Blocked and Reported, which
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  discusses these kinds of culture war issues, with perhaps the most blocked, most reported,
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  most problematic adjacent, he's not even problematic adjacent, anyway, he's just playing problematic,
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  gentlemen in the American culture wars, a man named Jesse Single, and I wanted to talk
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  to Katie because she has a very, and look, I wanted to be clear that when we talk about
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  the problem of the culture wars and wokeness and all this sort of stuff and cancel culture
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  and free speech, it can be easy to be misunderstood as focusing on this because I don't think it's
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  important to focus on the huge underlying problems of inequality or injustice that many
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  minority communities are fighting for, and nothing could be further from the truth.
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  That's precisely because I want the maximally robust version of pro minority rights to ascend,
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  and because I want our positions, I say our meaning on the left, broadly, to be as
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  defensible as possible, as appealing as possible, to as wide an array of people as possible,
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  that I have conversations like this where I try to pick apart the ways in which we're
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  failing to be good to one another in a way that seems appealing for other people to want to come
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  along on the social justice ride. So I just want to underline that that nothing here is intended
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  to say that the progress of people of color, of sexual minorities, of women is something that
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  isn't worth expending 110% of our focus on, but there is a little bit of a corner of the global
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  conversation which should also be directed towards conversations like the one I'm having
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  here with Katie, which says, how best do we articulate a generous and expansive and rampantious
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  and boisterous vision of a communal society where we can all reach towards a common truth
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  rather than being divisive? And that's what Katie's up to. It's what I'm up to. Please enjoy
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  this conversation. Follow Katie on Twitter, subscribe to her blog and report a podcast, and enjoy
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  me getting into it with Katie Hurtzone.
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  You know, Australians will abbreviate everything to the shortest possible. You know, it's, you know,
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  we'll, we'll, you know, we'll add eat on the end of anything to make a diminutive, a
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  breake for breakfast and so on. And when you go to the States, there's a lot of the opposite
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  where they'll say a taxi cab or tuna fish. Right. Right. Right. And all these are like, no,
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  why? Yeah. Yeah. We also, I don't know if this has reached your shores yet, but we also do
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  this thing where at least progressives do this thing where instead of saying something like
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  homeless people, we say like people experiencing homelessness. Yeah. We do. We do. You know,
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  what we call them here? What? We call them rough sleepers. Oh, I sort of like that. Yeah, rough
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  sleepers, because it also implies that, you know, it's not a permanent thing. Right. They're just
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  sleepin' rough. Right. Just sleepin' rough. So let give us, give people some background about,
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  I think that the most useful insights that you can provide us with apart from just being
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  your delightful self will be around the whole question of cancel culture and whether it's a thing
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  and whether it's just a term that right-wing people use in order to discuss a phenomenon of
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  social justice where sort of chickens are coming home to roost and people are being held accountable
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  for racist and homophobic and misogynistic behaviour that they could get away with in the past.
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  Which I think some cohort of certainly Australian listeners and my sort of woker friends online
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  in the States seem to think it is. But because you sort of find yourself both at the periphery
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  and the epicenter of a recurring series of controversies, can you give us a snapshot of where
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  you understand the kind of cultural dynamics of cancel culture being? Sure. I think both things
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  are correct. I think the term is unfortunate and it's been co-opted. It's been co-opted many times.
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  And it now has really been weaponized by certain people on the political right, particularly
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  politicians, as a way of sort of dodging legitimate criticism. Of course, that is the exact same thing
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  other people would say about the part of cancel culture that I think is real. But I think what
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  it describes is a broader phenomenon that includes what I have observed as an illiberalization of
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  the American left. So principles that not very long ago would have been considered sort of basic
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  liberal principles or progressive principles, things like the need for due process, free speech,
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  free speech, sort of almost above all else as these sort of central value have become,
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  we've sort of put down that mantle. Can I just begin by pushing back on the free speech thing
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  because and just to clarify terminologically, liberal you're going to use in the American sense
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  to mean left wing in Australia, the conservative party is the capital L liberal party. So we talk
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  about like big L liberals versus small L liberals. And we would normally use a small L liberal to be
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  more of a sort of a classical libertarian type old stuffy English person writing about free speech,
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  perhaps, but not necessarily being left wing. In fact, that might be more along the lines of
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  the economist magazine or a right wing sort of non-social conservative economically conservative
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  person. So I think people understand those terms. I'm not sure that the left has been terribly
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  committed to free speech in the past, the way that we currently think it was. Interesting. So you
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  think I have some revisionist history here? Well, maybe. I mean, I'm just I'm not one sort of
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  crisis of conscience that I'm currently undergoing through all this mess and we will elaborate for
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  people about the exact details of this mess in in a moment. If you're not quite sure what we're
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  talking about is that I started to wonder whether or not true free speech principles and
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  genuine old fashioned small L liberalism have never been terribly popular amongst the populace
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  and that it's sort of been something that they've gone along with because enlightened elites
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  have convinced them that's the right way to organize the states affairs. But actually the left
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  just as much as the right. I mean, think about the 50s when there was incredibly toxic
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  prohibitions on speech through McCarthyism on the right. But the left were apologists for Stalin.
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  Sure. And we're really not interested in having an honest and open debate about the limits of
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  communism. And so yeah, anyway, I just I'd throw in that observation, but that we can come back to
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  it. I think I mean, in that particular example, I think, you know, I'm not a historian and I wasn't
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  around then. So I have to admit some ignorance on this question. But I can't imagine, you know,
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  Kennedy, you know, being an impologist for Stalin. So are you thinking of like the far left?
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  Because that is, I mean, what we call it like in the United States, you know, left and liberal are
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  two very different things. Sort of loosely, maybe under the Democrat, the Democratic Party.
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  But it was your definition of left and liberal. Okay. So I think of leftists as more of an
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  economic stance. And right. So Bernie Sanders would be would be left. And Bernie Sanders wouldn't
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  even be far left. Bernie Sanders would be, you know, Democratic Socialist. And then liberal,
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  more free market, more, let's see. Yeah, just, I mean, just further to the right on economic
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  stuff, I think, is the biggest distinction for me. But maybe more traditionally committed to
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  principles of live and let live individualism. Like, you know, I may hate what the Voltaire principle
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  of, you know, I may hate what you say, but I'll defend with my life, you're right to say those
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  sorts of principles. Yeah. And I think the Democratic Socialist wing of the left left has never
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  been terribly much more associated with true liberalism than conservatives have been. I mean,
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  JFK is an interesting example because he was, he was such a beacon on the hill. But I mean,
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  he contains so much, so much of a sense of American optimism about what the future could have been
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  and so on. And his life was cut so tragically short. But I mean, if you think of more doctrinaire
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  labor union leaders and Jimmy Hoffa and people like that, the people who were very, very committed
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  to workers rights and old school leftism. I'm not sure they were that liberal. But anyway,
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  let's get back to the, let's, let's get back into, into camp liberal. And tell us what's going,
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  what's going on? Well, first of all, I think you make a good point there. I mean, has anybody,
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  are the people in power ever in favor of free speech? Maybe that's the question. Because there's
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  less need to defend the rights of everybody to say what they want if you're the people in power.
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  And right now, the cultural left or liberals at least have the cultural power. And now political
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  power too, of course, that depends on where you are. There are lots of states that are. But also,
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  I mean, that's interesting, Katie. I also would add to that not only are people in power ever
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  interested in free speech, but are ideologues ever interested in free speech. Right.
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  I mean, regardless of your politics, if you're a theocratic ideologue, if you're an Islamist
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  or if you're an evangelical Christian, you're not particularly interested in the free speech rights
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  of other people because you know that you're right. Sure. Absolutely. I mean, you know, liberalism
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  is a weird ideology in the sense that it's like the only thing that's right is that we're all
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  going to be able to be wrong. Right. You know, there are, of course, some exceptions that I think
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  numb chumps could be numb, excuse me, numb chumps could be maybe the most prominent. But right,
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  what I see happening now, and I think this is partly political, but I think it has more to do with
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  these cultural forces like social media, and also a response to Donald Trump.
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  You know, what Matt and Glaci is called the Great Awoking, what I see is just this sort of
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  increasing social pressure to adhere to one particular narrative or a few particular narratives.
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  Any deviation from that can come with really serious consequences.
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  And in some cases, those consequences can actually be beneficial to you, depending on who you are.
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  You know, if you're a person in the media and you get fired from your job or smeared as a bigot
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  or something like that, you know, in some cases that can actually be good. It can increase your
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  profile. It can get you more subscribers on substack. But of course, this isn't just about
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  people in the media or public figures. You know, there's also this sort of stifling effect.
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  So when people see these social media dragings or when someone's fired from a job for saying
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  something in politics or something like that, my concern is what that says to everybody who's
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  watching. And I get lots of emails from people who say, you know, I'm an academic or I'm in
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  tech or something like that. And they're genuinely afraid to voice any sort of opinion that
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  that they think might might go against the norm or the prevailing norm at this moment.
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  And I think that what are the prevailing norms at the moment? And what would some of those
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  dissident views be? Well, mostly I'm talking about I get I get emails mostly about gender
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  and gender insects. There's also of course race when we talk about this on my podcast a lot.
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  So if you're even a slightly to the right on issues like like the Black Lives Matter March over
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  the summer or if you or if you don't entirely believe the narrative that United States is a white
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  supremacist nation in every every aspect. I got an email from someone recently who said, you know,
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  I this was a guy he was a he was either in sociology or anthropology and he said, you know, he said
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  he was black. And he said, you know, I've seen racism in my life. I know that it exists in different
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  different facets of the country, but I don't see it on my on my campus. And but the prevailing view
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  on his campus was that the campus itself that this university, this incredibly liberal university,
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  was this sort of bastion of white supremacy. And he and this was a black guy and he didn't feel like
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  he could say that among his colleagues. And there's a reason he feels he can't say that because
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  people get fired for saying things like that. Can you give us some examples of prominent cases?
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  Sure. Yeah. And he's actually so he's at a public university. So he wouldn't actually be fired for
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  that. He's he had no bad act by analogy. So in his case, I don't think it was fear of firing as much
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  as it was this sort of the social stigma, even for even for somebody who is a minority within
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  his university. He's a minority within his university and also an ideological minority. But but
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  an example of someone who did get fired. So there's the reporter for slate, Mike Pesca.
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  And he had hosted a really popular podcast called the Jess. He'd been there for I think seven
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  years. And Mike got he had a slate, you know, they have a slack like a slack channel like
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  everybody, every media outlet. And during a conversation on slack as a sort of like teen,
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  we use teams here, probably a like a way of chatting while you're with. Yeah, just a with a chat.
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  And he was so he was on slack and they were having a conversation about the about the
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  the force resignation of Donald McNeil, this New York Times reporter sort of veteran reporter
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  for the time. He'd been there for over 45 years. And and Donald McNeil had been
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  for a set of his job because during a trip to Peru, a time sponsor trip to Peru with a bunch of
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  students, he mentioned the inward in the context of asking a question. The students were like
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  telling them about one of their, it's like, this is like a turd, I don't know, turduck in means
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  anything in Australia, but this is like a, it's like cancel on cancel on cancel. A 12-year-old had
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  said the inward, she was kicked out of school. Donald McNeil asked these people if, wait, this is
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  actually worth unpacking. I'm packaged stage of this. It's really interesting so people who don't
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  know it and most people who want. So let's start with the 12 year-old in influenza. So the route,
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  the ground zero of, of years later, Mike Pasca losing his job was its 12-year-old. Let's cast
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  our minds back to the beginning of time. It always starts with 12-year-old girl. Steven Hawking tells us
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  that in the first billionth of a second, the universe was a red hot mess. It was. And this
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  particular red hot mess was on a school bus. So this, the way that the story has now come out. So
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  it took months to like get the full story. But so what happened is that this 12-year-old girl
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  was on the back of the bus with one of her friends, maybe the front of the bus, I don't know. And
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  her friend was black and she was Jewish and they were sort of taunting each other with like racial
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  jokes or racial slurs. And apparently it was not, I don't know entirely in the details, but I
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  don't know that this was like a fight or a heated conversation. They were just sort of like being
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  kids, being edgy and making jokes, taunting each other with racial slurs as apparently 12-year-olds do.
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  And so a few years later, a video of this emerges and the girl was kicked out of school or
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  suspended. And so there was a school trip, a New York Times sponsored school trip to Peru. And
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  so it was these high school students. It's so hard to keep track of all this. I thought the 12-year-old
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  was the one who was doing a rap on Twitch or something like that. How many 12-year-olds are
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  getting cancelled? That was a 15-year-old you got kicked out of college, right?
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  She got kicked out of college because back when she was a kid, she'd done like a kind of a rap thing
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  and she said the N word in there. Well I don't know if she was rapping. I don't know if she was
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  rapping, but she said the N word. Well I saw one where there was just a girl who was doing her.
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  I'm not surprised. So this is not that. That's the thing. There are enough of these stories.
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  These are not so isolated that these are. We're not cherry-picking anecdotes. There is a
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  phenomenon going on here. I mean these are small. These are not. This is not a mass. They're
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  not at every school probably doesn't have this happening, but it is happening. Anyway so
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  this 12-year-old gets- Well I'm not sure. It probably is increasingly the case that at every
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  school they're going back through the social media accounts. Someone's going back through
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  the social media accounts of the kids who they don't like. It's been trying to find ways of-
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  That is probably getting them spending. I mean considering what teenagers are like and what sort
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  of information they have access to. Okay so Donald McNeil, so years later Donald McNeil is on
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  this school trip in New York or in Peru, sponsored by the New York Times. So this was a way-
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  He's the health reporter who had been at the paper for 45 years, but he really became famous
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  just this last year or became sort of a reporter but he wasn't sort of a- He was a celebrated
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  oldest, eldest, excellent of American journalism in a way and had done terrific work during the
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  pandemic. Because of COVID he became the big COVID reporter for the New York Times.
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  Right and then it came out that a year before COVID he went on this trip.
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  Yes and so this is a school trip. You wonder like why would any of these
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  any teenager want to go on a New York Times school trip and it wasn't actually school trip.
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  It was a spring break trip or summer trip or something and the reason is because
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  schools are incredibly competitive and so if you want to get into Yale or Harper whatever this
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  is a way of like building your resume and I suppose maybe having some experience at the same time.
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  So it's expensive it's like $6,000 for two weeks not including Harper. So these are the most
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  privileged students in America like they're not Saudi royalty but they're like very very privileged
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  American students and so on this trip so Donald McNeil goes on this trip as a favor for a friend
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  or a colleague and he had done it one one year before and there hadn't been any complaints
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  and basically he would give a few lectures and go around to these you know they would
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  go see like a shaman ceremony and learn things about different things about the local culture
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  and during this trip you know he would have meals with the kids too who are all white by the way
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  and during this trip they asked him about whether he thought this girl should have been kicked out of
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  school who was suspended for saying the inward and he in the course of like getting more
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  information he's a reporter he mentioned the word he didn't expert get it he didn't say the
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  inward he said did she say the inward or it's hard to talk about this too because I can't say the
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  word so did she say the inward or did she say the inward I'm winking when I say one of those and so
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  right I see did she say the phrase or did she actually say the word he was saying yeah so
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  that was in 2019 COVID happens he becomes the star reporter for COVID he's on the daily which is
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  the most popular podcast in the world I believe or at least in the US and you know anyway his
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  career is going well and he was at the end of it closer to the end of it than he knew so the daily
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  beast ran a story a few months ago I think in January about turned out that these kids had complained
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  in 2019 about his use of the inward and a few other things that had happened on the trip
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  things that they found problematic but he did not and I would not have found problematic either
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  so there's a it turns out according to the daily based investigation there was an investigation
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  in 2019 he was basically giving a talking to and he wasn't to lead any more trips not that he
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  would want to down in Peru and so the daily beast reports this you know two years later and the
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  New York Times which had already investigated this you know becomes like the talk of the newsroom
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  and of course the Times had already investigated the matter was resolved but then it wasn't resolved
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  anymore because his colleagues knew about it so 150 New York Times employees and we don't know
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  who those were so it could have been newsroom people or it could have been like the tech guys or whoever
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  tech gals to and tech non-minor identities I don't want to leave anybody out thank you this is
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  an inclusive podcast so 150 New York Times employees sign a letter basically demanding further investigation
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  and it's a long manner further investigation let's just pause for a moment further investigation
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  into a trip that happened a couple of years ago where he may have suggested
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  to over dinner to essentially grown up students these are college these are high school
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  sorry there's a high school students okay so there's some sort of duty of care there and perhaps
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  you should bite your tongue a little bit more but he was sort of just throwing around ideas about
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  whether about when and how it's appropriate to use to to be sanctioned for a child to be sanctioned
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  for using that slur in an argument on a school bus exactly and this investigation is going to get
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  relaunched right so and this of course comes on the heels of this this what's now called like the
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  summer the racial reckoning of the George Floyd death there's you know this is not just about
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  Donald Neal anymore this is about America times a hot times a hot and there's been so much drama
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  in turmoil within the New York Times and within the media about race in particular so so long story
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  short Donald McNeal is eventually forced to resign after like the leave 47 years at the paper he'd
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  started as a copy boy he worked his way up copy boy that's probably a problematic term at this point
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  now copy person any work any work his way up and so there's lots of reporting on this a lot of
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  it was bad like the daily beast said that he was accused of making sexist statements but they
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  didn't say what the statements were which either means that they didn't have the statements and they
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  were just assuming that what these kids said was was correct so there there was a lot of
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  bad reporting on this and then I mean it's possible that the type of old guy who throws around
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  questions about whether or not kids should be able to say the n-word also said things that aren't
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  that don't comport with our 2021 ideas about what anti-sexist language should be the question
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  just becomes what the penalty should be for being such a man well so we so so subsequently
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  he writes his own uh his own side of the story in a four-part series it's almost 20 000 words
• 27:37
  is hosted on medium he resigns from his job and then a couple months later after this he's like
• 27:41
  vetted his piece with lawyers here it says very long account so and he seems to have a very good
• 27:47
  memory of this stuff a lot of it because it was investigated he had notes about what happened at
• 27:51
  the time and if you look at the further complaints against him there it's nothing that would strike me
• 27:57
  I'm probably less sensitive than a lot of people in media and a lot of high school students but
• 28:01
  it's nothing that would have struck me as particularly in flamets or problematic um you know but of
• 28:07
  course like this is his experience these students are obviously more sensitive than he is but
• 28:13
  regardless you can actually see what he says happened and then compare this to the accounts that
• 28:16
  are published in the Daily Beast and Washington Post New York Times and everywhere else which is
• 28:21
  sort of an interesting exercise um so Donna McNeil is forced out and then this becomes of course
• 28:28
  the talk of Twitter and the talk of American media and Mike pesca at slate is having a
• 28:35
  slack conversation so right now we have two canceled people there's that's 12 year old and then
• 28:39
  there's Donna McNeil there's the beginning of the universe with the red hot blob of universe and
• 28:45
  then there's the 12 year old girl on the school bus and then there's the guy who's who's a
• 28:50
  celebrated health reporter at the New York Times for 45 years who has now essentially been fired
• 28:56
  from the New York Times for discussing that and Mike God bless Mike who is a friend who's a friend
• 29:02
  of mine and a former guest on the precursor of my old podcast uh he decides that it would be a good
• 29:08
  idea to to talk about this got love Mike on slack because he is a type of person who defends
• 29:17
  the right to argue to debate to think about things to to have a to have passionate reason he thinks
• 29:24
  he regards it and I haven't spoken to him since that all of this happened but he regards it I assume
• 29:28
  as being a a sign of respect to colleagues and interlocutors to treat them as grownups with whom
• 29:35
  you can have a conversation exactly and Mike would do this on his podcast as well so he would have
• 29:39
  people who who disagreed with him including his own colleagues on his show this is something that he
• 29:45
  has encouraged Jesse and I to do more on our show um it's just to have people who who we disagree with
• 29:51
  unfortunately a lot of them won't come on the show um but this is this is really a value that he
• 29:56
  holds dear and I think it's a very important one um that you have discussion and debate and
• 30:03
  that doesn't mean that anybody's a bad person to disagree and he has these ideas out um
• 30:09
  and the benefit that Mike has presumably in his mind is he doesn't work at the New York Times and
• 30:14
  he doesn't work at a place that is so beholden to work social media mobs and public shaming he
• 30:20
  works at a place slate that was founded on a on a principle of diversity of thoughts and alternative
• 30:27
  argumentation but that's the thing it's clearly changed because okay so so we should
• 30:33
  wrap up the last story yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so Mike is on slack uh debate like talking to
• 30:40
  his colleagues about the Donald McNair Neil firing and he makes the argument that there are some
• 30:45
  situations in which white people shouldn't be fired from their jobs for saying the end word he
• 30:48
  doesn't actually say the end word he says he expurgates it but he makes this argument which is
• 30:53
  an argument that I've made I made it on my podcast a couple weeks before Mike a lot of people have
• 30:58
  made this argument white people black people people of all colors it's a valid argument and then one
• 31:04
  that I mean just to clarify before three seconds ago in cultural time it's an argument that some of
• 31:11
  the most uh prominent and most uh extremely woke black activists themselves were making including
• 31:18
  ton of easy coats and you know and people who are who are now associated with the what one might
• 31:24
  call the eliminationist side of the argument exactly I wonder I would love to know he's he's
• 31:29
  been sort of absent I know he's working on like like HBO shows but he has really not weighed in on
• 31:36
  on any of this which is very interesting to me yeah where is he he's like in France somewhere where
• 31:42
  is he because he's a really smart articulate and persuasive guy it would be interesting to hear
• 31:48
  what his take is anyway yes sorry so Mike does this thing that until about probably three years ago
• 31:54
  was understood had a context I mean not even three years ago because okay so Mike Mike says this
• 32:00
  thing long story short Mike also he is suspended without pay indefinitely I haven't heard if this is
• 32:07
  if he has been officially fired yet but his career is late is effectively over so so this was
• 32:13
  you know 2021 this is how recent it was for the the norm to be that there are some cases in which
• 32:20
  a white person can write or say the word um you know not directed at a person but in quotations
• 32:28
  mentioning its existence etc I searched the word on the slate website exactly as I did on the
• 32:36
  New York Times website this is why we love you Katie because no one else could be bothered but you
• 32:40
  actually we're okay yeah what did you find sort of you feel sort of a little transgressive
• 32:46
  even typing the letters out at this point so I searched word on the slate website immediately after
• 32:51
  I heard that Mike was was suspended it has been printed on the the slate website 700 times
• 32:55
  including as recently as 2020 so you know I did the same thing during the well the argument could be
• 33:02
  made though that it's different right that the that hearing the words causes a special kind of
• 33:06
  pain or something that that seeing it doesn't I suppose that argument people yes people have
• 33:11
  made that argument but regardless Mike didn't didn't say it he or he didn't type it he didn't
• 33:17
  mention it at all and then well but then there was an additional claim during during all of this
• 33:23
  that he had been recording a podcast and he had to read I think it was the quote where he had to
• 33:30
  say the word and so he did a version with it and then a diversion without it and then discussed
• 33:34
  with his producer after the fact and this is something that I've done with profanities as well you're
• 33:38
  in you know you're in the privacy of your own studio you go oh am I going to say it let's hear how
• 33:42
  it sounds when I actually do the the thing and say the full on fuck and with all that stuff and then
• 33:46
  you go you come back and go oh no we should probably just let's let's bleep it all let's find
• 33:50
  another way to do it and so the the argument was that this is another strike against him because he
• 33:55
  allowed the mouth sound out of his mouth but the person and even though they decided not to release
• 34:00
  I mean he was with his producer his producer is a white guy so he didn't even say this in the you
• 34:06
  know in the ear that you're shot of a of a person of color or a black person it's so how condescending
• 34:11
  is that to black it's so condescending it's so condescending how condescending is that to all of my
• 34:16
  friends I'm afraid to say it people of color like it's ridiculous that they would that like oh my
• 34:20
  thank goodness there was none of them in the room because they are so fragile it's it's clearly
• 34:26
  more taboo but I guess the point being that like how would this guy have been how would he have been
• 34:30
  like personally wounded by this it didn't I say yes if that's the if the argument is that there's
• 34:35
  legacy of slavery and that just hearing the mouth sound brings up some ancestral vision of lynchings
• 34:40
  or something then that wouldn't apply to a white person right I mean I do agree with you that it
• 34:44
  is condescending to assume that black people cannot hear the mention of the existence of a word
• 34:50
  that isn't actually uncommon and that they're somehow going to melt I like I mean they like they
• 34:57
  might they might like I can totally understand if they have a grandparent who was you know if they're
• 35:02
  descendants of slaves and that isn't incredibly taboo thing and it triggers them in some way
• 35:06
  that's possible but that would be a vanishingly small fraction of the community for whom that
• 35:11
  that's okay my issue with that is that it presupposes that any individual can't tell the
• 35:16
  difference between mentioning a word and hearing it as a slur and I just I think that people can
• 35:23
  tell the different I mean obviously like a lot of people especially black people think that I'm
• 35:26
  wrong about this and what are you know there's no there's you know this word will never come on
• 35:32
  when you say especially black people I think that's an interesting question as well because it's
• 35:36
  interesting it's interesting that Mike's producer who ended up you know leaking the fact that he said
• 35:41
  it was a white guy because in my personal experience I find that white like progressives are much
• 35:49
  more exercise and energized about this than any of my black friends it's the same with trans
• 35:56
  issues or anything like I mean my transgender friends of whom I have an increasingly large number
• 36:00
  now which is great they don't give a shit if I accidentally get the pronoun wrong like I'm sorry
• 36:05
  that they didn't quite come out right like I'm not they like to worry about it I mean it's like
• 36:09
  you know just as long as you're trying as long as you're on my side but hellhath no fury like a you
• 36:14
  know like a cis like a young white cis millennial who's like you used the wrong word you said that
• 36:20
  thing so anyway just park that as a as an observation but yeah carry on about this like level of
• 36:25
  performative allyship like you're being mad on behalf of people who probably don't give a shit
• 36:30
  it's one of the more aggravating aggravating and the I'm like if you think of the most oppressed
• 36:36
  members of the of the black community in america like some some old black guy who endured
• 36:44
  lose still has memories of like Jim Crow he's not gonna give a shit about Mike pescaron slate
• 36:51
  like saying it in the in the context of talking about the word nearly as much as the Brooklyn
• 36:56
  hipster in the cafe it's right right absolutely okay so mike it's suspended indefinitely and uh
• 37:06
  wait where were we so mike it's yeah yeah i think we basically did right yeah yeah so now mike is
• 37:16
  is kaput and at the same time that mike was enduring this just as an aside my favorite podcast
• 37:22
  reply all implodes for its own insane reasons which we can also get into but yeah finish the
• 37:30
  thought about closing the loop on that whole triumvirate of right so the moral of the story is
• 37:36
  watch out for 12 year old girls um you know it's gonna happen it's 12 year old girl says the
• 37:42
  inward and and and years and years later and thousands of miles away um people are losing their
• 37:47
  jobs yeah i mean i want to make the point here to make it clear if the listener doesn't quite get it
• 37:53
  that we're not arguing for the right of white people to talk to to use that word like i'm
• 37:59
  perfectly happy for there to be a rule that says that you can't ever talk about that word um even
• 38:06
  if you're just talking about it in like you know you can't ever mention those mouth sounds if that's
• 38:11
  gonna be the rule and that's the new rule and we all agree on that rule okay sign me up i can do
• 38:16
  that i think it's a bit infantilizing i think it's a bit silly but i'll buy into it what i can't
• 38:22
  buy into is a retroactive public shaming which hunt of people for not abiding by rules that we've
• 38:29
  just come up with that they didn't know were rules at the time they were doing it right exactly this
• 38:32
  is the thing it's retroactive right so people are are being punished in some cases for things that
• 38:42
  they were not taboo at the time and so okay so i searched slate slate has 700 you know instances
• 38:48
  of the word as recently as last year the New York Times the place where Donald McNeil was fired
• 38:54
  for saying the word what that was printed had printed it the week before the week before i've
• 39:00
  looked at mpr mpr has uh it's in like seven large i'm sorry like 30,000 uh like of their of their
• 39:06
  like web pages um which means that they have set it on air a lot i mean slate in particular is a
• 39:11
  place where you know Christopher Hitchens made the argument in the pages of slate 15 years ago that
• 39:18
  white people should be able to that censorship in this case is is is unproductive and white people should
• 39:25
  you know not be essentially fired for mentioning this word um so you can see how much has changed
• 39:31
  totally and and the controversy over the word is way less important because there are really
• 39:37
  no stakes to us changing the rules about about that if we want to them the the overarching umbrella
• 39:42
  under which it's taking place which is an umbrella in which even ideas about these topics are
• 39:48
  becoming taboo so like the the of those three of those three things that that comprise that
• 39:56
  chit storm that you just described the middle one the Peru New York Times health reporter guy
• 40:03
  like his sin seemed to be largely that he was sort of dismissing the validity because he was it
• 40:09
  it wasn't part of the accusation that he was also sort of saying like look racism is something that
• 40:15
  was terrible in the past but in reality these days uh there's there are no legal impediments to
• 40:20
  to you on the basis of any race so i think it was even even more nuanced in that he said that
• 40:25
  he didn't deny the existence of racism he said different institutions have different different
• 40:30
  basically levels of racism and that and that what you see in the New York Times is not going to be
• 40:34
  the same as what you see in the prison system or the military right right so even so expressing
• 40:41
  sort of dissident ideas and this is where we can bring it into a bigger conversation about
• 40:45
  what's now being called sub stack bros i guess which is so what which is basically a phenomenon
• 40:53
  of independent thinking journalists being forced out of mainstream institutions i mean the
• 40:58
  example that you gave is one of them but you can rattle off a list of names like madaglaceus who
• 41:05
  was one of the founders of vox being forced out of vox uh andry Sullivan being forced out of
• 41:10
  was it the Atlantic where he was at New York magazine i think that what that might not be
• 41:15
  might be too strong for Matt i mean he i think he was increasingly uncomfortable with uh the sort of
• 41:21
  i don't know the level of discourse there um yes he might be a barri-wise situation where barri
• 41:26
  also who was the opinion page editor at the New York Times uh she left because talk about a toxic
• 41:33
  work environment i mean you know toxic work environments tend to get associated with minorities
• 41:39
  finding themselves i'm feeling like they're not part of the old boys club but now we have a toxic
• 41:45
  world environment it's a toxic work environment in which anyone who is opinions that go against the
• 41:51
  the grain or that might be a little bit devil's advocate or uh that don't fit perfectly with the
• 41:58
  ethos of the of the millennials who now run the public shaming uh social media accounts that
• 42:04
  influence the institution gets get hounded and get forced out essentially and that happened to
• 42:09
  barri and it happened to to to Matt and to some extent probably andry Sullivan as well and then there's
• 42:14
  Matt tiby uh leaving rolling stone if you don't know these names these are all big heavy hitting
• 42:21
  like good uh journalists and and opinion writers whose opinions just just tend to they just like
• 42:29
  sort of poking around and saying things that are a little bit controversial and thinking about
• 42:33
  things from left field well things that that weren't even controversial you know five minutes ago
• 42:41
  and and Matt tiby i think he still is doing some things with rolling stone and he's been on
• 42:45
  substack for a long time i mean the other thing is that uh you know barri was certainly bullied
• 42:52
  mattinglaysias was a boss so he was you know in a in a different position than her but it can also
• 42:57
  be incredibly lucrative um to leave your institution right and it turns out that a lot of people
• 43:03
  explain the economics yeah explain the economics of this to us because 10 years ago when you were
• 43:07
  fired by an institution uh like the New York Times you were sent out to the Siberian wilderness
• 43:13
  and you got eaten by a polar bear now we have the technology that you can actually have a more
• 43:17
  lucrative career outside of mainstream institutions than not a podcast like this is an obvious
• 43:23
  way to do it and everybody knows how much money Joe Rogan uh makes so you know that's that's
• 43:29
  viable but substack is this relatively new phenomenon to people who don't use it what is it so it's
• 43:34
  a newsletter platform it's on strings that this has become uh you know a newsletter services
• 43:39
  become this sort of hot button um issue in the last couple weeks but basically the way it works is
• 43:47
  you develop a newsletter and uh basically like a weekly publication or a monthly publication
• 43:53
  or whatever and you cultivate an email list and people can pay can pay essentially to get your
• 43:59
  newsletter um and some of you can decide to do it free or or paid or whatever um and if you're
• 44:05
  a big name like Glenn Greenwald or Matt Glacias or Matt Taibe and you have a lot of readers um you can
• 44:14
  make a ton of money a ton of money much much more money than you would make at almost any staff
• 44:20
  job in America and it turns out that because people are basically subscribing to a magazine that
• 44:25
  you self publish that get the derives online and they might pay five bucks a month and it has
• 44:29
  basically a overhead unless you hire an editor it's uh you basically create a small business
• 44:35
  with no overhead um and that requires like you to just write your column um so uh so some of these
• 44:44
  guys are doing really really well much better than they were doing I'm like you know five times the
• 44:48
  income um that they're making at these publications and this is probably not a good trend for a lot
• 44:55
  of reasons including you know it's incredible one of one I think one of the main problems that's
• 45:00
  facing us right now is is based on the fact that we exist in these little media silos and echo chambers
• 45:07
  and we don't uh talk across party lines or when we do it or if we do it's yelling at each other
• 45:13
  and we also don't um read anything or absorb absorb news from the you know the other side if
• 45:21
  we can pretend for a moment that there's only two sides in American culture that's another
• 45:27
  pitpeave of mine when they're when you know people are like you need to give give your time to
• 45:32
  the other side like how stupid are you you think there are two sides everything there's two big
• 45:36
  columns and there are just conservatives in one and then there are liberals in the other world
• 45:40
  progressives in in the other and like I mean I sort of whenever I'm accused of being one side
• 45:47
  or the other I'm like anyone who anyone who's clear headed about things if you're judging each
• 45:53
  issue on its merits then it's highly unlikely if you look throughout history across places and
• 45:59
  across times that any particular party or ideology has a total monopoly on being right about everything
• 46:05
  so if you're always siding with one then you know you're going to be wrong on some number and if
• 46:11
  you're judging things on their individual merits then by definition you're going to end up
• 46:15
  seeming hypocritical or hopscotchy or like sent or you know independent in some way and you're
• 46:20
  going to piss off both sides in in some capacity because obviously if you were to you know if a
• 46:26
  if an alien with a superbrain were to come down and try to select the most rational solution to
• 46:33
  a whole range of different problems those problems that those solutions are not all going to be
• 46:38
  co-opted by the you know not all going to come from the one ideology anyway that's my little rant
• 46:44
  no you're right I mean and people hate seem to hate centrist more than anyone else that is the
• 46:48
  worst thing as if we're wishy washy or something as if we're like not committed to something I'm
• 46:55
  trying to find a rhetorical way out of that by calling it like radical centrism or like radical
• 47:00
  independence or something like that but right it is hard to to to partisan's and ideologues to
• 47:05
  understand the necessity of of judging things on their merits rather than for a team yeah um so
• 47:12
  sub stack has now now become the target of a campaign that is not only trying to get these people
• 47:22
  who were hounded these writers who were hounded out of mainstream journalistic institutions
• 47:28
  out of those institutions but is there is they're trying there are people who are trying to get
• 47:32
  them off sub stack by creating rumors about shadowy deals that sub stack is making with these journalists
• 47:41
  right but they're not and implying that the journalists are publishing hate speeches right it's
• 47:46
  the thing is like so much of it is incorrect so sub stack does have they have what's called a
• 47:52
  sub stack program and and they basically give an advance to somebody in order to like
• 47:59
  woo them over to sub stack to leave their job and and woo them to sub stack if you're really
• 48:03
  big right it's not actually a very good deal because the way it works is they'll give you let's
• 48:07
  let's say a hundred thousand dollars and then for the first year they take 90% of your earnings
• 48:12
  but you're guaranteed to make that hundred thousand dollars for that first year and then after
• 48:16
  after that it goes it switches so it's just an advance on on future earnings it's not like it's
• 48:21
  it's free month it's only free money if uh if your sub stack doesn't do very well um which I'm
• 48:28
  sure has happened in some cases advances don't always uh make money for the publishing house or
• 48:32
  or the platform or whatever um but it's it's just it's like the book model isn't and you know it's
• 48:38
  it's common yeah maybe not in uh in media or at least in an online media but it is like it's just
• 48:43
  a book model so a bunch of people got mad because the biggest names on the platform some of these
• 48:50
  people who are offered sub stack pro deals um are problematic they don't they basically just don't like
• 48:56
  them and in terms of people who actually took the deals I think it's like Matt Taiyuki took one is
• 49:01
  one year uh Matt and Glacias took one I don't think Len Greenwald did I don't think Andrew Sullivan did
• 49:07
  um which financially is the is the better move and so but people are mad about this but what they're
• 49:15
  they're accusing these people specifically of transphobia sometimes it's racism too or like various
• 49:20
  other other bigotries um basically they just don't like them and so they're using this this
• 49:25
  sub stack pro deal the sort of argue that sub stack is is is like you know paying these bigots or
• 49:32
  something like that sub stack also has like a pretty diverse apparently group of people within
• 49:37
  sub stack sub stack pro um but they're not complaining about those people they're only complaining
• 49:42
  about these like five or six people and they're getting a bunch of the the figures wrong like
• 49:47
  they're saying that it's like Barry Weiss got a sub stack pro deal my coho chassis single they didn't
• 49:51
  get offered these deals um so there's been all of it but even if they had got these deals like since when
• 49:57
  is it the job of like this is so it's not good enough that people who have different opinions
• 50:03
  from you are excluded from mainstream institutions you're not even allowed to make a side hustle
• 50:09
  on an independent platform where people pay you directly for your writing anymore i mean they're
• 50:14
  trying to get these people essentially deplatformed from sub stack from getting paid by individuals
• 50:22
  so they're not they can't go after advertisers because these people don't have advertisers on their
• 50:26
  on their newsletters so they're trying to make it impossible for me or you or anybody else
• 50:32
  to support the writers that we want to directly support um and they're doing it by going after
• 50:36
  the platform and a bunch of them have uh have left the platform hilariously they're going to
• 50:42
  ghost which is the even like more free speech platform more laissez faire policies or medium um you
• 50:48
  know a place where where lots of people publish including people who they certainly find problematic
• 50:54
  and they're and they're not actually hurting the people they want to hurt so they want to hurt
• 50:59
  Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan and Jesse single and Barry Weiss the the people who are going
• 51:05
  to leave sub stack uh who are going to take their business from sub stack because are not the same
• 51:12
  people who would be giving those people money so it doesn't even make any sense and what has happened
• 51:17
  so my co-host Jesse signal is one of these characters and he's not in the same no sorry sorry
• 51:24
  to Jesse but he's not in he's not in the same league as the big guys let's just say Jesse he's not
• 51:30
  he's in he's in podcasts my league he's uh he's an early he's not he's not you know he's not
• 51:35
  making a million dollars a year off of his sub stack like some of these people are that's not Jesse
• 51:40
  unfortunately because then I could pay him less and so Jesse has been just basically defamed
• 51:47
  all across sub stack so people are writing these these newsletters on sub stack this explain
• 51:52
  the backstory of Jesse because uh I've spoken to him on ABC radio and Sydney talking about um about
• 51:58
  cancel culture when there have been I think it was after the JK Rowling letter to try to explain
• 52:02
  this to to people but if you're not super online then the whole what we're talking about may seem
• 52:08
  quite abstract like why are these these people must be bad if they're trying to get
• 52:12
  de-platformed like so what exactly is it let's take Jesse and then maybe you can pick either
• 52:17
  an Andrew Sullivan or a Madagascar or a Matt Taibian explain to people who aren't familiar with them
• 52:22
  the sorts of things that they're saying that are so objective so Jesse's big crime is that in
• 52:27
  2018 he wrote a big story for the Atlantic a cover story for the Atlantic about youth gender
• 52:35
  dysphoria and uh in when kids transition and this piece was deeply reported it was like 10,000
• 52:41
  words it was way too fucking long and he spent years working on this piece and went all over the
• 52:48
  country interviewing people talked to tons of clinicians it was incredibly thorough Jesse doesn't
• 52:53
  everything that Jesse does is thorough he does not know how to do like superficial anything um he
• 53:01
  is the most pedantic little Jew you will ever meet he's like he's like a borrowing worm uh he is
• 53:08
  and he is accused of only like being pedantic and focusing on trans issues but no he's like that with
• 53:12
  everything um so Jesse wrote this incredibly thorough piece and there was this crazy online backlash
• 53:20
  i know it was going to happen because i had a year before i had written a piece about
• 53:23
  detransitioners were people who transitioned from one sex or gender together and then changed
• 53:28
  their mind and transition back and there was this crazy backlash a lot of it was online but
• 53:32
  it was also offline to be we're burning stacks of the paper and sending me video of it it was
• 53:35
  this it's the whole thing it was just a crazy time and just to clarify if you read online depictions
• 53:41
  of Jesse's peace it they will describe the pieces being uh dismissive of the transgender experience
• 53:49
  and uh at and a way of trying to blow up uh detransitioning as being a real problem that it's not
• 53:57
  and then you actually read the piece itself and you go that's not at all right what's actually in
• 54:02
  the past it's it's it's uh it's simply a piece about um it's it's a piece that i found very
• 54:07
  respectful of the whole spectrum of of gender experience and simply saying like what should the
• 54:13
  process be from a clinical position when uh physicians are confronted with these slightly more
• 54:19
  ambiguous cases uh you know you don't want to funnel every single five-year-old who uh who has
• 54:26
  some kind of self-expression that might not be consistent with their with the gender that they
• 54:30
  were assigned at birth into a highly ideological path where they're being forced into uh into an
• 54:36
  assumption about their transgenderism but nor do you want to ignore that so how do you deal with
• 54:40
  those conflicting interests that was the the framing and some people found that so offensive that
• 54:46
  i guess to to be as respectful as possible towards the anti-jesse brigade uh they might have
• 54:53
  seen that as being yet another attempt by the anti-trans system that had for years tried to
• 55:01
  diminish the transgender experience to raise a little question marks and you know dispute little
• 55:06
  things and nitpick or something which is not what the article did but i'm just trying to frame it
• 55:09
  in their context and that critique of jesse's peace started spiraling out of control into what has
• 55:15
  now become i mean i feel so sorry for the guy because it is a truly defamatory freight train
• 55:21
  of innuendo about him being like somehow obsessed with trans people or something right so this
• 55:29
  so there was some good faith criticism of the piece um of course there always is but a lot of
• 55:35
  it was just ad hominem attacks and a lot of people probably didn't read it um and you know since
• 55:40
  you read it you know that the the rumors about the peace and no way reflects what it actually says
• 55:46
  jesse the irony of all this is that jesse is far to the to the left on on trans issues than probably
• 55:55
  most americans he's in favor of youth gender just or i'm sorry of a of youth transition you know
• 56:01
  with a good diagnosis he raises a few a few questions but for the most part like he's on board with
• 56:08
  95 percent of of the orthodoxy um and so this this has mutated though into this bizarre defamation
• 56:15
  campaign where a writer for instance named jude oil she's are they sorry he uh jude uh transition
• 56:23
  a couple months ago well you call yourself quickly there so jude think you just cycle through every
• 56:28
  pronoun in the space of three quarters of a second uh so jude was a well-known feminist writer until
• 56:34
  until very recently and and then recently transition actually well known sort of well known on
• 56:39
  twitter um so jude oil writes that jesse is uh is pro conversion therapy which is not true
• 56:48
  and also that he stalks trans women and and jude said basically i don't need to provide the
• 56:56
  names because there are too many of them just i don't know they said something like i don't know a
• 57:01
  trans woman in york media who doesn't have a story about jesse meanwhile none of these stories
• 57:07
  have actually come out because there is no evidence that he's a stalker that he's obsessed with
• 57:13
  trans women that he harasses trans women none of the stories have come out and to clarify what he might
• 57:20
  do is if someone accuses him of being uh anti trans he'll say i'm not can you provide evidence
• 57:26
  and then that will be and then the fact that he's got a lot of twitter followers will be evidence of
• 57:32
  yeah of him sicking his hordes on on them and if you know if someone who who is genuinely anti trans
• 57:38
  then then throws a slur at the person or something then that gets all bound up into the jesse
• 57:43
  anti trans thing because he tweeted something that was questioning of my criticism of him and now the
• 57:49
  the mob has come from me right so defamation is is is okay but defending yourself is not
• 57:56
  it's basically what it comes down to right right right right this is this campaign has lasted for
• 58:00
  over two years um it's been in some ways arguably good for his career his sub-sex doing very well
• 58:07
  our podcast is doing very well um but it also has this you know jesse is a serious writer he's
• 58:14
  written for he was a staffer at New York magazine he's written for the Atlantic in the New York
• 58:18
  and he wants to be able to write for prestige outlets and these people have made that very difficult
• 58:25
  he still has relationships with some some outlets and i'm sure this will not be the last that he
• 58:29
  publishes with them but if you're an editor who you know might want might want a jesse single story
• 58:38
  a jesse single piece uh you're gonna have to deal with a bunch of shit from from twitter if not from
• 58:47
  your own colleagues so people are gonna avoid it and that's really unfair because he hasn't
• 58:53
  actually done anything wrong he's incredibly thorough um and he he he's not a bigot and nobody has
• 59:00
  he's not a bigot he's not a harasser he's not a stalker and nobody has provided any sort of
• 59:05
  evidence or even told stories about what he has done to them um and that for some reason doesn't
• 59:12
  matter it really reminds me of QAnon because these people don't even need to have a victim to
• 59:17
  believe in this conspiracy um and it's just it's gotten really crazy today so today um
• 59:23
  uh it's monday um jesse uh not here it's not maybe it's true they're already in Australia
• 59:30
  away ahead of the future um so jesse and monday in america um there's an organization called glad
• 59:36
  that used to be known as the gay and lesbian alliance against defamation um hilariously
• 59:42
  um glad uh defame jesse they added him to this list of what they're calling their accountability
• 59:49
  list or their accountability project and it's this website you go to and there's a drop down menu
• 59:54
  and you can choose people like Donald Trump and Mike Pence and Rick Santorum um and then jesse
• 59:59
  single and uh and it'll it'll give you a little a little bullet pointed list about about jesse's
• 1:00:05
  crimes there's it's a three bullet pointed list and they got all of their all of them wrong all
• 1:00:09
  of the facts are wrong um to the point where jesse complained about this as you rightfully
• 1:00:13
  should on twitter and people started uh presumably um complaining to glad and they started editing it
• 1:00:21
  in like in real time um they've still left him up there uh they they also had jk rolling on the list
• 1:00:27
  they she was on the list this morning and she's no longer on it which is i guess what happens when
• 1:00:31
  you have nice fancy lawyers you can get yourself removed um but but jesse still is and so so this
• 1:00:39
  happens today dan savage who uh i don't know if he's if he's well known in australia but uh he's
• 1:00:45
  probably well-known within the podcast universe but i mean i'm a big fan of his and he's uh yeah he's
• 1:00:50
  done he's been on my uh by used to have a show on radio national and australia which he was a guest on
• 1:00:54
  he's america's most celebrated probably sex advice and culture and columnists yeah so dan
• 1:01:00
  defended jesse um and dan and i used to work together at the stranger he's he's he's
• 1:01:06
  he's he's been through this for 15 years people have have also accused him of transphobia um but
• 1:01:14
  that has sort of quieted down in recent years and he sort of kept his head down and then today he
• 1:01:18
  popped his head up and he defended jesse and uh he's now trending on twitter oh shit yeah yeah
• 1:01:27
  dan is the most loving kind of like uh gay expensive like sex positive uh gender positive do
• 1:01:41
  whatever you want express yourself however you want find you get your rocks off however you want
• 1:01:46
  sort of sort of person and the the idea that he would be anti trans for defending jesse's journalism
• 1:01:56
  is so topsy turvy it's so or wellian it's so back to front it's it's so obvious that the
• 1:02:03
  accusation means nothing other than you are dissenting from our orthodoxy therefore we're gonna
• 1:02:08
  hunt you down and try to punish you yeah rather than you actually are disrespecting the humanity
• 1:02:15
  of people because he would be absolutely okay with all expressions of of gender with all individual
• 1:02:21
  expressions of gender he might just you know it's the horrible thing about this Katie is
• 1:02:27
  once the slur is said enough against you once the accusation is made and the rumour mill
• 1:02:34
  is trundling along it almost doesn't even matter whether or not the original Atlantic peace was
• 1:02:38
  reasonable because it takes on a life of its own doesn't it's it's like not only is a publication
• 1:02:45
  that hires jesse now gonna have to deal with the twitter hordes who come after them they're also
• 1:02:50
  just gonna have to deal with the large bulk of people who vaguely know the name and vaguely know
• 1:02:55
  that it's a negative that the guy is suspicious right it just becomes accepted is true and it's been
• 1:03:02
  really interesting to watch because you can see the process of these rumors mutating right so first
• 1:03:08
  of all you know it started out with jesse he what was it he he was accused of like
• 1:03:15
  emailing so i don't i don't remember what it was there's no there's no evidence that any of this
• 1:03:20
  that he's done anything wrong but these sort of these things sort of mutate right so it so someone
• 1:03:24
  says he's obsessed with trans woman and then a couple years later that becomes you know he's a
• 1:03:30
  stalker and at the same time you know there are very few people in mainstream media who are
• 1:03:36
  willing to look into the story um which is which is really disappointing because it's a it's an
• 1:03:41
  interesting story um and it's one that tells us a lot about the about the moment that we're in
• 1:03:48
  right now and i would love to see Ben Smith of the New York Times New York Times media call him take
• 1:03:52
  this on but i don't think he's gonna do it because the penalty he probably wouldn't get fired but he
• 1:03:58
  would get he would get socially ostracized in a way that's just not worth it for most people you
• 1:04:05
  have to be really really ostracized already to be able to defend jesse when i say he'd get fired
• 1:04:13
  what i mean is if he wrote about it honestly there'd be a massive social media backlash against him
• 1:04:17
  and then if he tried to defend himself after the backlash instead of putting out a statement saying
• 1:04:22
  i now understand the hurt and pain that i've caused and it's time for self-reflection if you
• 1:04:26
  tried to double down on his right to write about it then there'd be some kind of inquiry and then
• 1:04:31
  the slacker machine would start getting going and his millennial colleagues would start
• 1:04:35
  chattering and it wouldn't take i mean it might take a while but eventually this rumor mill would
• 1:04:40
  would arise and it would and there would be some reason why uh there'd be some reason to let him go
• 1:04:46
  i just think we i think we've gotten to that to that point it's like i mean i was speaking literally
• 1:04:51
  just yesterday to a millennial about uh jk rallying because i'm interviewing eighty years
• 1:04:57
  out later today for another project that i'm doing and i'm a huge fan of eddies eddies are great
• 1:05:02
  uh a great british comic and actor um and she's now a she after having been a they for a while
• 1:05:10
  after having been a he um and i'm interviewing about something completely unrelated uh and so i was
• 1:05:17
  just mentioning you know being nervous about getting the pronoun pronouns right because the she is
• 1:05:21
  is quite new and this millennial producer who i was working with was saying um and i was saying
• 1:05:28
  like i don't think that she'd mind at all i mean it's unlike she seems like a reasonable person
• 1:05:33
  and if i screwed up i'm not you know i'm not too bothered and i was saying it's usually the like
• 1:05:37
  what i was saying to you earlier it's usually the the very woke cis straight uh white uh person
• 1:05:45
  who's trying to enforce the the rules more than the person who's actually a member of the minority
• 1:05:49
  community and this millennial producer said yeah i mean i'd just like you know why do people get so
• 1:05:54
  upset about about this on the other side pretending that there's some kind of that there's a
• 1:05:59
  they who are trying to enforce something it's like jk rallying has turned into a transphobic
• 1:06:03
  bigot because she says that they are stopping her from saying things but nobody's stopping her
• 1:06:07
  from saying things and nobody's being punished just for speaking the truth like she's she's
• 1:06:11
  tilting at windmill she's making up uh up straw men and it's so sad that i that my youth that
• 1:06:16
  was spent loving these books has been contaminated by jk rallying turning it you know frothing
• 1:06:22
  out such bigotry uh into into the world and i was like wow have you read the letter have you
• 1:06:29
  read what jk rallying literally said which is hundred percent supportive of transgender people
• 1:06:35
  thousand percent percent empathy towards them but as a woman and as a victim of sexual violence
• 1:06:42
  from men i personally feel that the experience of growing up as a girl and going through puberty
• 1:06:49
  as a girl means that i'm entitled to have some sort of solidarity with with women with biological
• 1:06:54
  women with womanhood uh that that is uh quarantined in some way from uh from people from from trans
• 1:07:04
  women that there should be some some understandable difference some recognition of the difference
• 1:07:09
  between a uh a girl who was born a girl and grew up as a girl and went through puberty as a girl
• 1:07:14
  and someone who didn't and that that's all she's saying and that claim now and like i might
• 1:07:20
  be fired in five years because even even saying that and presenting it as a reasonable rather than
• 1:07:25
  a bigoted position is a fireable offense in five years i think right now simply mentioning that
• 1:07:31
  is not fireable yet at least in Australia i will say but that belief that there's something this
• 1:07:39
  that belief that was so cherished by the feminists of the 1960s by germane greer and camellapaglia
• 1:07:46
  who did so much for womanhood the idea that there's something special about being a girl
• 1:07:51
  that that that claim is now enough to get you in the minds of my millennial producer
• 1:07:59
  to be perceived as a frothing at the mouth transphobic bigot and to get jesse's i don't even know if
• 1:08:05
  jesse believes that but to get jesse's life ruined and then dense average who defends him
• 1:08:09
  in a swirl of controversy it's no longer about hatred or respect for the humanity with
• 1:08:15
  other person or respect for the ideas of the other person or or trying to build each other up by
• 1:08:20
  bouncing ideas off each other and trying to be generous in our interpretation of what other
• 1:08:24
  people think in order to collaborate on on reaching towards a deeper truth it's i don't know where
• 1:08:31
  it is it's like it's it's it's it's about thought crimes right and it's punitive and there's no
• 1:08:37
  room for forgiveness and things are being you know mediated things from the past are being
• 1:08:44
  mediated through the standards of today which is a very bad trend um yeah something strange
• 1:08:49
  is going on and it's hard to it's hard to know you know i i think that we're in a moral panic
• 1:08:55
  but it's also possible that i'm within the moral panic and i can't see it and we're sort of
• 1:08:59
  panicking about this thing that um you know is isolated and the truth is that we spend too much
• 1:09:04
  time to twitter on twitter but all of those things are probably true i mean and and it could still be
• 1:09:09
  a problem right exactly and but when you see people being fired from their jobs and in the us i
• 1:09:14
  mean because health care is so intrinsically tied with employment um that could be a literal
• 1:09:20
  death sentence for somebody which is which is a totally different different problem um you know
• 1:09:25
  and one that needs to get addressed politically um but you know i mean this is just being fired
• 1:09:31
  can run your life um and some people benefit i think i've i've oddly benefited from from all the
• 1:09:40
  sort of controversy around my work in some ways i mean financially i certainly have socially
• 1:09:46
  probably not um yeah and this is look this is something that the critics of of of the of the
• 1:09:52
  uh not the critics of cancel culture but the critics have quote unquote cancel culture the critics
• 1:09:55
  of conversations like these often say which is like where is the person who's doing so so poorly
• 1:10:01
  out of this you talk about all these journalists who got fired from the new york times they're making
• 1:10:04
  millions on sub stack now like people are doing okay jk rowling is still selling lots of books this
• 1:10:10
  this is a problem this is a storm in a teacup because nobody's actually really being uh having
• 1:10:14
  their lives ruined which i think is missing the point well i think it's also not true i mean like i
• 1:10:19
  can think of i was just right before we started talking i was watching a podcast between two young
• 1:10:24
  women who were fired from their jobs one in one in publishing one in tech um for expressing basically
• 1:10:29
  the same opinion that jk rowling did and these are not people that that most of us have ever heard of
• 1:10:34
  um you know yeah and i mean in addition to that i what i care about
• 1:10:39
  as a broadcaster and a conversationalist and is is our ability to have uncomfortable conversations
• 1:10:46
  pardon the pun about things in the hopes of of creating a common demos or a common
• 1:10:54
  polity that has us all on more on increasingly the same page and that tries to act against the
• 1:10:59
  fragmentation and the fracturing of culture that's happening thanks to social media and all kinds
• 1:11:04
  of political forces like globalization and so on and the less you can talk about things the more
• 1:11:11
  you know the the the less we're going to be able to do that and and so it's less about the
• 1:11:15
  individual victims and more about the message that they send to everybody else where every time
• 1:11:21
  you have a conversation you're always thinking a second and a half ahead about what you might be
• 1:11:26
  about to say and about whether that could trigger a tripwire and look it's great if you're thinking
• 1:11:30
  a second and a half a set ahead so that you don't say hey to it's nice ass and you're about to
• 1:11:36
  slap someone's ass in the office plates you know in the workplace and i totally understand that at
• 1:11:40
  any given point in cultural evolution there are going to be people who sound a bit like us saying
• 1:11:47
  it's political correctness gone mad but this isn't that this isn't that it's not that we're saying
• 1:11:54
  you should have the right to make racist jokes it's that we're we're saying that ideas ideas
• 1:12:01
  articulating beliefs and opinions should not be grounds for a social media mob to publicly shame
• 1:12:08
  a large company into a knee jerk reaction that makes you lose your livelihood and in the United
• 1:12:14
  States yeah yeah yeah right it the thing it like it is true that we live in a society there are
• 1:12:20
  things that are verboten there are things that you shouldn't say and there are always going to be
• 1:12:23
  consequences for that but what is happening is that the the line of acceptable thought has become
• 1:12:30
  so narrow that things that were that are factual beliefs things like you know that there's a
• 1:12:38
  difference between males and females or that male and female or separate categories that exist
• 1:12:43
  you know have become problematic have become fireable offenses and that's deeply troubling
• 1:12:48
  you know obviously standards change over time it is the things that we are that are socially
• 1:12:54
  acceptable to say now in some ways of course I think that's it's obviously it's good that people
• 1:12:59
  aren't aren't are we'll face social social stigma for throwing out racial slurs for being
• 1:13:05
  actually racist but the over two in window is closing so narrowly that nobody's going to be able
• 1:13:10
  to get through it soon and if you're if you're if your job is discussing ideas that's a big problem
• 1:13:19
  it's also the case that I mean precisely the it's precisely the arbitrariness of where we find
• 1:13:26
  ourselves on the advancing needle of of ethical progress that makes me suspicious of people who
• 1:13:33
  want to condemn someone forever for for breaching the norms of of right now if that's a slightly
• 1:13:42
  complicated sentence let me put it this way there will be things in the future that when they look
• 1:13:46
  back on today they think how on earth were those people just casually doing those things and the
• 1:13:53
  people who are out with the pitchforks and the flaming torches now trying to condemn people for
• 1:13:58
  being racist or transphodes or whatever the transgression might be seem completely oblivious to the
• 1:14:03
  fact that if they were living in the 1950s they'd be thinking 1950s thoughts they were living in the
• 1:14:10
  1700s they'd be thinking 1700s thoughts and in 50 years time people will look back on the content
• 1:14:15
  of today and there'll be the little disclaimers in front of the Disney cart Disney movies that my
• 1:14:21
  kids have to sit through for 10 seconds that say the the portrayals of of race in the jungle book
• 1:14:28
  were wrong then and they are wrong today and this happens on Aladdin and this happens on all kinds of
• 1:14:32
  by the way I was looking for the jungle book Katie the other day for my kids and I couldn't find it
• 1:14:37
  anywhere even when I tapped it in only jungle book two came up and then I tried logging out of the
• 1:14:42
  kids account and I logged back in as an adult and jungle book showed up so it's actually not
• 1:14:47
  available anymore for children because jungle book is so problematic is it because it's a little
• 1:14:52
  annoying because of is it child it's I'm kidding no it's colonialism but you know think about
• 1:15:02
  climate change for example the depiction the depiction in film of people casually getting on
• 1:15:07
  planes and going hey let's go for a weekend to Hawaii or the treatment of animals which I think
• 1:15:14
  our ethical intuitions are becoming increasingly keen on. The idea of people just going out for
• 1:15:19
  a burger and the people in the movie have don't express any question about whether or not
• 1:15:25
  that cow was tortured all of its life in order to make a pound of its flesh slightly cheaper.
• 1:15:30
  These are things that I could imagine in a hundred years. People look back and go,
• 1:15:34
  how did they just do that? And they did pay no attention to it whatsoever.
• 1:15:38
  I'm sure I assume that in a hundred, not even a hundred years and maybe 30 years will be
• 1:15:44
  eating lab-grown meat and looking back at our previous selves with utter disgust.
• 1:15:51
  Yeah, so hopefully the people of the future will have more sympathy towards the work of today than
• 1:15:55
  the work of today due towards the people of the past. Or not.
• 1:16:01
  No, it'll be flaming torches and pitchforks all the way into the future, perhaps.
• 1:16:10
  And lastly, just because you mentioned glad, that makes me really sad. The gay and lesbian
• 1:16:15
  alliance that they were maligning Jesse and so on. Because it reminded me that Amnesty,
• 1:16:24
  I recently got stuck into Amnesty on social media because the election of Alny is that
• 1:16:29
  the name of the Russian dissident. Am I misremembering that? The incredible, probably the bravest
• 1:16:34
  political activist in the world who voluntarily went back to Russia so that Putin could lock him
• 1:16:39
  in a freezing cold cage for simply fighting for democracy in Russia, was taken off the list
• 1:16:47
  of political prisoners by Amnesty because he had expressed racist, I don't know if it was racist,
• 1:16:52
  but he was basically anti-Georgian sentiment or anti-immigrant sentiment, basically saying that
• 1:17:00
  Russia should be more protectionist towards foreign ethnicities. And that was enough to get him.
• 1:17:08
  And so I was saying on Twitter, how does something that he said 20 years ago about non-ethnic
• 1:17:16
  Russians have anything to do with whether or not he's currently a political prisoner?
• 1:17:19
  Right, and you've seen this... It's extraordinary. Yeah, this ideology has taken over
• 1:17:23
  institution. I mean, that's the thing, if this were just happening on Twitter, that would be one
• 1:17:27
  thing, but institutions are really changing. You can see this in the ACLU in lots of gay rights
• 1:17:31
  organizations, plan, parenthood, and it's concerning and I don't know where we go from here.
• 1:17:41
  Do you want to leave us with a more optimistic note? What's the sort of best and worst case way
• 1:17:47
  that this now pans out? Okay, I do not think we're going to get to some sort of cultural
• 1:17:52
  revolution. I do not think that the United States is ever going to be rounding people up and
• 1:17:56
  putting them in prison camps for wrong think. Our institutions, our government institutions
• 1:18:00
  are too strong for that. But, you know, a class of people being unhierable, that's certainly not
• 1:18:08
  hard to imagine that's happened before. I think that this moment will pass because
• 1:18:15
  everything does and if you look sort of really big picture, it's always progress. We always make
• 1:18:20
  progress and so I take I take heart in that and I also I'm a person. What's up? I mean, do we?
• 1:18:26
  Sometimes we die. Big picture. I mean, I guess it depends how long. Yeah. Wow.
• 1:18:30
  It depends how long you can take. Well, so I'm such a pessimist that when I get depressed or when
• 1:18:36
  I start to think about like how bad it appears as those things are going, I think like, you know,
• 1:18:42
  this is a really small moment in time. The universe is billions and billions of years old.
• 1:18:47
  And ultimately. Oh, we're going out to the universe again now. Yeah, they're okay. The red hot
• 1:18:51
  the red hot nothingness at the beginning of the universe. It's ultimately nothing really matters.
• 1:18:56
  So that's my way of soothing myself to sleep. Instead of thinking about my fancy life.
• 1:19:01
  So that slim pickens Katie. That's not much consolation to me. Okay. Well, that's that's nice.
• 1:19:07
  And and thank you for your time and and for talking about all of these things on your
• 1:19:11
  excellent on your on your podcasts. I should say because you're something of a joy and of podcasts.
• 1:19:16
  You currently have two podcasts. Is that no? I just have the one. Oh, you just have blocks
• 1:19:19
  and reported. Yes. Maybe I'll maybe I'll fire just to get started in the one that if he gets
• 1:19:24
  it too canceled. All right. I'm in. Thanks, Katie. Good to talk to you.